Lens & Pen Blog

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

We’re moving our Lens & Pen Pressblog from Blogger to Word Press and will consolidate the two current blogs into one for our books--the Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks, the James Fork of the White (coming 2017), Damming the Osage, Mystery of the Irish Wildernessand See the Ozarks--and many other favorite topics of discussion like the Ozarks or water resources.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Shortly after Empire
District Electric built Powersite Dam across the White River, creating Lake Taneycomo, the big
electric company announced plans to build a 200-foot dam upriver at Table Rock
Bluff.

Most bluffs along Ozark rivers are named. Table Rock Bluff
had a relatively flat top and was accessible by road. A visit to this overlook
was on many vacationers’ itinerary.For
decades locals anticipated seeing machinery in the valley below building a huge
dam.That this never occurred frustrated
dam supporters and led them to question if the utility really intended to
proceed. They didn’t.

The Army Corps
would build Table Rock Dam many years later but the Corps didn’t build it at Table
Rock. They moved the location two miles upstream to a more stable geological
site, but kept the name.Table Rock
Bluff remains a popular scenic overlook, but is now fenced for safety – unlike
the past as shown here.

COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

The Springfield-Cape Girardeau Diocese encompasses the land where John Hogan established the settlement now remembered in the Irish Wilderness. See its full history in Mystery of the Irish Wilderness.

In honor of St. Patrick and my Irish ancestors, Lens & Pen Press is offering Mystery of the Irish Wilderness ($18.95 retail) for $15, postage paid, during the month of March! Order your copy at: http://www.dammingtheosage.com/buy-the-book/
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COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Tonight, the National Archives is hosting the release of The Forgotten Irish: Irish Immigrant Experiences in America, by Damien Shiels. Mr. Shiels has impressive credentials as an archaeologist and military history writer.

The title is intriguing. According to the editorial write ups, the 35 families whose stories are told within its pages were (East Coast) families of soldiers who died in the Civil War. I would expand the "forgotten" category to include the pre-Civil War settlers in Missouri's Irish Wilderness!

The event will be live streamed on youtube. I for one will be watching.

In honor of St. Patrick and my Irish ancestors, Lens & Pen Press is offering Mystery of the Irish Wilderness ($18.95 retail) for $15, postage paid, during the month of March! Order your copy at: http://www.dammingtheosage.com/buy-the-book/
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COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Located just east of J highway in Ripley County, a few miles north of the Irish Wilderness, lies the tiny hamlet of Handy, Missouri. In 1859 and 1860 when Irish settlers were arriving, this area had a heavy concentration of land patents with Irish names as claimants. The ravages of the Civil War in this remote Ozarks land disrupted, some say destroyed, Father Hogan's once-hopeful colony. After the war, one could draw the conclusion that some settlers may have returned – a possibility suggested by tombstones in the Catholic Cemetery near Ponder as well as by a Cram’s 1875 map showing the tantalizing name, New Ireland, in the approximate location of Handy. (see page 76 of Mystery of the Irish WIlderness).

Written on the back of this unmailed postcard is the following information:

Noah Haney Founder of Handy Post office was
commissioned as Post-Master Sep. 9, 1913 – Resigned in favor of his daughter
Mrs. Catherine Probst Oct, 28 1932 – Mrs. Probst served as Acting P.M. until
Commissioned as Postmaster May 13 1935 – and continued as same until Post
Office was closed Nov. 30 – 54 – Mail was carried from Fremont, MO by truck –
in Carter Co.

In her master’s thesis, "Place Names Of Five Southern Border Counties Of Missouri,"(University of Missouri, 1945) Cora Ann Pottenger recounts the story of how the Handy Post Office got its name:

Established in Noah Haney's
small country store. The story is told that because of poor penmanship in the
petition, the postal authorities mistook the suggested name Haney for Handy.
Some remarked that the name was appropriate for it would now be so
"handy"--convenient--to get the mail twice a week right at home,
instead of going the long distance to Pine. (A.C. Randel; J. Whitwell; Harry
Thaxton; Postal Guide 1915-)

In honor of St. Patrick and my Irish ancestors, Lens & Pen Press is offering Mystery of the Irish Wilderness ($18.95 retail) for $15, postage paid, during the month of March! Order your copy at: http://www.dammingtheosage.com/buy-the-book/
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COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Young Father John Joseph Hogan was not the only Irish idealist hoping to establish communities for those he described as "people of small means." His exploratory forays into the Ozarks did result, however briefly, in the establishment and growth of a small settlement mostly in Oregon and Ripley counties.

On a Cram's 1875 Missouri map is the enigmatic toponym, New Ireland. It appears to be located near the present day site of Handy, an area that had a heavy concentration of 1859 and 1860 land patents with Irish claimants. No historical society has any documentation or record of new Ireland as a Missouri place name.

Lynn Morrow, noted Ozarks historian, provided this opinion: "Cram's 1875 map has a number of these idiosyncratic place names ... that, like New Ireland, occur for a short time and then
disappear and are not repeated by subsequent cartographers, although I
(and no one else) have not systematically compared them. I don't know if
there is a source that explains where Cram got all of his information,
but it's certainly not all from surveys and post office records."

Chapter 20 of Tim Egan's recent best seller, The Immortal Irishman, is entitled "New Ireland." In it he notes the American consul in Dublin, William West, in the late days of the Civil War proposed rewarding Irish solders for the Union with 'some desirable portion of our territories and call it New Ireland, of which no doubt General Meagher would in due time be elected Governor."

Thomas F. Meagher ("The Immmortal Irishman" of the title)in his post-Civil War career sought to find that 'desirable portion of our territories' for the Irish in Montana Territory. Meagher was painfully aware of the abysmal tenement conditions in which East Coast Irish families mostly lived. Hogan's pre-Civil War concern was the plight of Missouri's Irish (servant girls and railroad workers could not - by the nature of their separate employment circumstances - meet, marry and raise good Irish Catholic families).

Google the phrase, New Ireland, and other locations show up. Some have an actual community associated with it.

!!HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!!

In honor of St. Patrick and my Irish ancestors, Lens & Pen Press is offering Mystery of the Irish Wilderness ($18.95 retail) for $15, postage paid, during the month of March! Order your copy at: http://www.dammingtheosage.com/buy-the-book/
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COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Before the construction of the run-of-the-river hydroelectric
Powersite Dam on the White River near Forsythe, float fishing was the primary sporting
attraction for the Shepherd of the Hills Country. Lake Taneycomo, which filled
in 1913, didn’t eliminate the celebrated Galena-to-Branson float, but it gave
Branson and Hollister an advantage over Galena. The small lake was more
compatible with larger, motorized watercraft than the shallow flowing James and
White rivers in their native state.By
the mid-1920s the shoreline at Branson Landing was filled with larger motorized
tour boats and smaller cruisers.

The times - and Branson- are a-changin'! This shows just how different life a hundred years ago was in Branson. Motorized tour boats accommodated auto-delivered tourist who
came to sightsee, not fish, float or commune with nature. Lake Taneycomo was
compatible with Arcadianism but it opened the door to mass tourism. Today Branson
Landing is a big modern shopping center, showing few traces of this earlier era.

COMING IN 2017: JAMES FORK OF THE WHITE: Transformation of an Ozark River.